Ep. 122 | Lifelong Connections with Consumers with Jeff Nemeth at Ford

This week Jeff Nemeth, Executive Director of Total Ownership Lifecycle Management at Ford Motor Company joins Allison Hartsoe in the Accelerator to talk about consumer trust. While a lot of effort goes into measuring net promoter score and customer voice, Jeff brings it all back to one ingredient, consumer trust. He talks in detail about the consumer experience after the purchase, why you shouldn’t focus on price and how to deduce what value means to your customers.

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Allison Hartsoe: 00:00 This is the Customer Equity Accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom-line impact by identifying and connecting with revenue-generating customers, then this is the show for you. I’m your host, Allison Hartsoe, CEO of Ambition Data. Every other week I bring you the leaders behind the customer-centric revolution who share their expert advice. Are you ready to accelerate? Then let’s go! Welcome everyone. Today’s show is about creating lifelong connections with consumers. And to help me discuss this topic is Jeffrey Nemeth. Jeff is the executive director of total ownership life cycle management at Ford motor company. Jeff, welcome to the show.

Jeff Nemeth: 00:46 Oh, thank you for having me, but I’m actually not as complicated as my title.

Allison Hartsoe: 00:51 That’s great. But you have quite a unique background. Maybe you could give us a taste of how you landed in this role and what kind of experience you had that led you to this role?

Jeff Nemeth: 01:02 Sure. I feel like I’ve had like five careers in my lifetime with all the different things that I’ve done. I’ll just give you a few examples of, I think, some pivotal moments in my career in my life that led me to where I am today. I started out in engineering, and when I was in engineering, I noticed that when we were designing the chassis for the vehicle team that I was on, we had the specifications for what the dampening ratio would be in the shock absorbers. And I thought, huh, I wonder what that means. So I started thinking about it, and I thought, what I really want to know is how does a customer wants to feel when they drive the car? How do they want to feel about the ride? So I rewrote the specifications into customer language, right? When I hit a bump, I want to feel it like I feel when I drive a Toyota Sentra or Nissan Sentra or something like that.

Jeff Nemeth: 01:52 And so what the unintended consequences of that was the engineers became more customer-focused. So while before they only focused on that tolerance or that spec, now they actually had to go out and talk to customers and understand what the customers really wanted, how they wanted to feel when they drove their car, and then translate that into a dampening ratio. And you might’ve come up with the same answer, but at least you got the customer feedback into it. And, um, we called those level three specifications. And so that was really good. And then they said, boy, this guy, we should probably move him to marketing because he loves people. And so when I moved into marketing and I worked for a company called Saturn at the time, and they had this thing called the no Dicker sticker. I don’t know if you remember that some people do.

Allison Hartsoe: 02:40 I do remember that.

Jeff Nemeth: 02:42 Yeah, and so we actually put up a little jar in the middle of all of our counter. And any time you use the D-word, you had to put a dollar in it because they weren’t dealers, they were retailers. And so you couldn’t call them dealers. You had to call them retailers. And so, you know what, and trying to convince the dealers to sell vehicles as the prices, the price what’s on the window sticker like Macy’s or the gap and how, and so it kind of revolutionized the way we thought about selling cars. And instead of salesmen focusing on the deal, the salesman focused on the customer, right, answering the customer’s questions. It wasn’t like trying to get them close, the deal to sell the car because the price was the price and they got paid a salary. They didn’t get paid a commission. So it was just answering the questions for customer’s questions.

Jeff Nemeth: 03:28 So through that, then I went to Ford, and I went through marketing and finance and product development. And then I went to running our Africa business, which was 50 countries and hundreds of dealers and three manufacturing facilities. I did that for about eight years, and that really taught me a lot, especially in Africa, with all the different cultures. And I mean, they’ve got 2,000 languages on the continent.

Allison Hartsoe: 03:51 Is that right?

Jeff Nemeth: 03:51 Yeah, and just try to understand, and, and all the kind of the tribal history and a lot of that social structure was still there, even though the political structure isn’t there the community. And so just understanding how different people think and really that enabled us to achieve market dominance with our ranger pickup truck in Africa is really understanding the customers and how to rate relate to them. And that’s what led me back here to focus on customers.

Allison Hartsoe: 04:17 So, what is the total ownership life cycle management role. What does that actually mean?

Jeff Nemeth: 04:23 Well, I think when you think about maybe the different hats that this might, that my team wears, what we’re presently doing is trying to lead a cross-functional strategy that will reduce the cost of the vehicle for our consumers. And when I came back from Africa, they basically wanted me to try to figure out why our cars used car values were lower than some of our competitors. And what that evolved to is trying to figure out how we manage the trust relationship with our customers. Cause it’s really about after they buy the car. And most of our point of view inside the company is how do we design a car that customers want, well, how do we price it? How do we distribute it, the normal kind of business case of how do you sell something, right? How does your business make money? And so we know tons and tons about customers that want to buy a vehicle. What we don’t know a lot about is how customers feel after they buy the vehicle. And so that’s what I do. And I try to build a trusted relationship because trust builds loyalty, loyalty builds lifetime value,

Allison Hartsoe: 05:26 Which is a number that we absolutely love. And I’m noticing through your stories that there’s a very clever use of language to reframe or change the perception from a deal to a customer or from a metric to a customer. And I think that’s just a very smart tactic that you’ve used. And I wonder if that’s part of the lifelong connection to a customer, and most companies would really love to have this lifelong connection to their customer. And yet it’s not a foregone conclusion when products are sold. Why is that?

Jeff Nemeth: 06:01 You’re right. Companies want to do that, but it’s not like we’ve been in business for a hundred years because we don’t listen to our customers. Right. Obviously, we do. So what’s the differentiator. And I think it’s understanding that it’s a more complex equation. It’s really about what’s the psychology for building that relationship with the customer. And what are the ingredients of a trusted relationship, and how do you become the most trusted provider of your good or service to the customers that you want to appeal to? And across today’s demographic landscape, one size doesn’t fit all. So we’ve got our F-150 best-selling vehicle in America for 47 straight years. And then we’ve got our Mustang, the most filmed vehicle in all of history and the best selling sports car of all time. So we’ve got a great baseline to look at where we’ve got big groups of customers who trust us, and they trust us through a relationship with our brand.

Jeff Nemeth: 06:56 So what we’ve done is we’ve tried to take that and assess the customer archetypes that those vehicles appeal to understand how we might appeal to the archetypes for other vehicles. And so an example, a lot of people talk about gen X and even millennials. Although there that’d be talked about as much anymore, cause there are the 20 somethings anymore. They’re getting into the 30 somethings. And so when we think about gen X and millennials, everybody says, well, they’re frugal, they’re affordability is an issue for them. It’s getting harder for them to make ends meet. They’re a lot more to family and to income families. And what we’ve discovered in looking at them specifically is they aren’t necessarily, they’re frugal, but they define frugality differently. They define frugality as value, not money. And so there’s a lot of gen Xers and millennials that will spend for luxury and spend for comfort because that has a value to them. And then what happens is gen Zers and millennials then sit around the dinner table with gen Xers, and they’ve influenced them because mom and dad listened to their kids, and they want to be hip, and they want to do, you know, and so we’re actually through the gen Z and the gen X experiences and value equation. We’re actually finding that we’re influencing Gen Xers as well. So it’s pretty cool,

Allison Hartsoe: 08:15 That’s a really interesting flow where you might have expected it before where the parents influenced the kids. But now you’re seeing that the kids are influencing the parents. And I really like how you’re unpacking the mass labels that might be applied, especially when it comes to value versus money. Is frugality about the value, or is it about the actual money spent? That seems like a clever way to unpack the customer base. Is this a general reflection that consumers have changed over time? And now maybe the younger generation has more influence over the older generation.

Jeff Nemeth: 08:53 I’m not an anthropologist. So it’s hard for me to make that distinction cause I’m kind of working in the today, and I haven’t studied the yesterday, but what I do know is what we see is a different set of behaviors associated with the value equation of gen Z or the Millenials. And we see them having different definitions for the same values that the Gen Xers and the boomers or the echo boomers have, but with a different language. So what we see is is that success at winning this game involves appealing to them on different, like a three-dimensional chessboard and understanding that influence between generations and within value sets.

Allison Hartsoe: 09:32 I think that makes sense. And I wonder how as those archetypes change and the values change, do you have to see the thinking change internally at Ford as well to evolve and hold that lifelong connection to the consumer.

Jeff Nemeth: 09:48 Yeah, because of that, that lifelong connection again, it all comes back to focusing more than ever on the ingredients of trust and the roots of trust really vary with different demographics in the end where the common denominator we believe is delivering an exceptional experience over and over and over. And no matter what demographic that we’re thinking about with zero degree of uncertainty, we want them to have that exceptional experience, which then drives the brand that they can trust. So that when you ask, if that’s permeated through the company, what’s really interesting is what I had this conversation. So here’s a guy coming back from Africa that nobody knows in Detroit, you know, are fairly docent. That’s probably a little bit. And I go in, and I’m talking to our executive committee, our CEO, Jim Hackett, and the rest of the executive committee. And I’m having this discussion very similar to the discussion I’m having with you.

Jeff Nemeth: 10:42 And they’re kind of looking at me like I’m speaking from another planet and is that was the way I felt. So then I laughed. They said, great love the presentation, love the way you’re thinking, keep going on this route. And about three weeks later, our creating value framework came out, and our winning aspiration was to be the world’s most trusted company. And that was kind of a turbocharger for me. I was like, Oh my gosh, I didn’t even realize that I was discussing with them what our company’s mission was going to be. Uh, uh, our winning aspiration has done another way. That’s the way we describe it is that really a mission. And so what’s been really great that our companies embraced it and really given me the space and the resources and the ears to take it to a level that even I didn’t expect it to go.

Allison Hartsoe: 11:26 Do you think the air cover that you get from the CEO and just the sheer alignment helps you get your programs off the ground internally?

Jeff Nemeth: 11:34 I’m sure it does because they ask questions about what’s your total cost of ownership strategy. They were at a review in Brazil, and I didn’t even know they were there. And the next week, I get a phone call from the person who’s running Brazil, who happens to be a friend of mine. And he says, Hey, listen, I need your help. We were reviewing our product plan, and the CEO asked the question of what’s our TCO strategy. What’s our total cost of ownership strategy. And they said to talk to you. And so we spent some time putting together a strategy for him. So, and that’s really just getting the right question. If you’re getting our executives to ask the right question, is really what gets it going? Cause then people know they care about it. They know they should care about it. And then they come to us and we help them with some of the tool set, but really I want to teach a man to fish, right, or to give him a fish. So what we end up doing is we give them the tools. We spend weeks, sometimes months, teaching them the theory and how to implement it and how to deliver that to customers through our dealers. And then we let them run with it. And they pretty much just come back and ask us when they have questions. And so it’s been really, really impactful at all levels of the organization.

Allison Hartsoe: 12:41 Well, that’s very powerful. I believe in that strategy, getting executives to ask the right questions is half the battle. And then you’re arming them with tools. That is a very strong approach. I’m wondering if we could circle back to a few minutes ago, you said that exceptional experience drives trust and have to take issue with this a little bit because when we think about the customer lifetime value, and we think about CLV, we’re oftentimes looking for what good customers do and what not so good customers do. And the idea of giving an exceptional experience to everyone and being like Nordstrom and taking your return for tires that you never sold in the first place. It’s kind of ridiculous. So is there a certain grain of understanding who really good customers are and how to nurture or encourage good customers to become better as opposed to just giving an exceptional experience to everyone?

Jeff Nemeth: 13:36 Yeah. That’s a fantastic question. And I’m glad you asked it cause I don’t want to give the wrong impression. One of the things that we think is super important is in developing the most valuable lifetime customers. That’s what CLV is all about customer lifetime value. And so when we first started, my team first started, we spent about six months just talking to everybody that would talk to us. And we went and talked to Delta, for example. And, and when, when we talked to Delta, it was funny. We were sitting in this conference room and on the wall of the conference room where these three ladders NPS, and both the guy that I was with, who was my second Albert Albert and I were sitting there, and we were both kind of glancing at it. And about halfway through the conversation, we said, what’s the MPS. And they said net promoter score.

Jeff Nemeth: 14:18 And we said, really, and one of the questions I asked them was, how did you go from an average? So for decades, they were just an average airline. There’s a couple of schools that do this airline ranking every year. And it’s well recognized. It’s like JD powers with cars. It’s their airline ranking. And they said they went from being constantly in the middle of the pack to number one in seven years. And I said, how’d you do that? How’d you go from the middle of the pack to number one? And they said net promoter score. And so I said, tell me about that. And so they said, you know, we basically word of mouth is important. And we want our people to promote our brands. So the net promoter score is the number of people that would actually recommend your brand. Plus, the number of people who would not recommend your brand.

Jeff Nemeth: 14:58 And that sounded to me like trust, because if you feel strong enough about a brand to tell your friends or your neighbors or your other family members about it, then you’re trusting that that brand is going to deliver on your reputation because you recommended them. So it’s kind of a cousin of trust. So when we were talking about it, we said, well, who do you focus on? And they said our business travelers. And they said, so we want to give them everything that we can. We want to do everything for them to make them a promoter. Cause we want them to bring more business travelers to us by recommending us. And they said, in fact, we had this one program where we gave them the ability to gift diamond level SkyMiles for a day. And so they get them, they get the free lounge access, and they get them like up in the air.

Jeff Nemeth: 15:48 When the captain came to sit down next to the guy, you know, so you congratulations for making 10 million miles, the purser comes out and welcomes them by name, thanking them, no matter where you are on the plane, you get a glass of champagne if you want it. But just all these little perks to make their most valuable customers feel special. And so they would do it to try to bring more people into that fold. So what was interesting is we started doing that if we have a vehicle and it and something breaks after the warranty, if it breaks during the warranty period, of course, we fix it. No questions asked because that’s part of the agreement to serve our customers, but it fixes after the warranty period. So customers come to us and say, I don’t think that should have broken and we have a conversation with them.

Jeff Nemeth: 16:28 And what we do is we look at well, have they bought Ford cars before? So we calculate their lifetime value. How many Ford cars have they bought? So we’ve got a customer database, and we know that Mary, who just called in this is our third Ford that she’s bought. And she always goes to the Ford dealer for her oil changes. She’s a very loyal customer, chief, and start cause we started using NPS. So in the future, we’ll be able to know if she’s a promoter, and then that’s what we use to decide. Should we fix that car for her, even though it’s outside of warranty. I think there’s a certain minimum of level of providing exceptional experiences every day and every time. And then there’s kind of the supercharged level where you exceed their expectations by a large degree, and you do that with your promoters, and then they can become because we know the most, the strongest influence on trust is a recommendation from a friend, so if we can create more promoters or get them to promote more often than we’re going to get more.

Allison Hartsoe: 17:28 I think net promoter score, it sat out there for a long time. It’s still a good tool. Um, it’s amazing how long it has been prevalent in the market. I don’t think it’s as sharp as CLV, but CLV doesn’t necessarily give you that feeling of would someone promote this product? Although I do think it is somewhat transitory. I might be super happy about this at this particular moment in time. And then you have a little bit of a time period where you can take advantage of that. Or you can help with that. Um, in order to perhaps do the warranty or give a reward, do you take into account the time once somebody has said that they are positive on the brand, does that always stay positive, or does it degrade over time in your calculation?

Jeff Nemeth: 18:16 Yeah. So what we’ve found is net promoter score and corporate reputation. We’re getting into all my KPIs. I love this. So are not as sticky as trust. So net promoter score it really depends on have you had exceptional experiences over a long period of time and or, but it’s easy not to have an exceptional experience once and kind of thing. You just don’t tell anybody about it because then you’re kind of nervous about it. You’re nervous about telling somebody, and corporate reputation is kind of a rational metric. So you read what other people say. You look at one of the great things. One of the things good about Ford from a corporate reputation standpoint is the ventilators we’ve been making for COVID-19.

Allison Hartsoe: 18:56 Congratulations. Thank you for that.

Jeff Nemeth: 18:58 You’re welcome. And it’s great. If you want to find a company that can make very complex thing, it’s easy to find a company that can make complex things. And it’s easy to find a company that can make a lot of things, but it’s hard to find a company that can make really complex things really quickly. And that’s what a car company does every day. So we were perfect for this job. I mean, we were happy to do it and step up and do it. But anyway, our corporate reputation is spiked because of that. And what, but what we find is that’s a rational and trust is a belief and beliefs are sticky and you, and they’re internal they’re feeling. And so you’re right. Net promoter score, while we focus on the promoters, might not be, they might not always be promoters. They may just decide next week that they’d rather drive a Honda.

Jeff Nemeth: 19:43 And then they aren’t Ford promoters anymore because they don’t promote something they don’t experience generally. But that doesn’t mean that they don’t trust the Ford. It might just mean that they got a better deal, or they had a car that met their needs better than one of the cars that we had. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve lost their trust in Ford. So what we’ve found is a trust really is a much stickier than NPS or recommend or reputation, but you have to focus on all of them. And if you use net promoter score and CLV together in your construct, that’s when it becomes powerful. So it’s the combination of these metrics. So I’m not deep enough yet with my customers. I’m not intimate enough with them yet to understand what their ingredients of trust are. But when I do, then I’m going to marry that CLV, and I’m going to find out what my and think, how powerful that will be. I know my most trusted customers and which ones are the most valuable to me. And then I can really target building that trust and expanding that trust with those customers.

Allison Hartsoe: 20:41 Well, and you know, obviously, you’re speaking to the choir when it comes to loving the use of CLV and understanding it as a sensitivity metric to your customers. But I really like what you’re saying about trust is stickier than NPS. And so it occurred to me that in your example, before with Delta, I’m basically the same person using the product again and again. And I might give word of mouth to other people who use the product separately, but I can’t pass along an airplane. Like I can pass along a Ford. And in your case, you’ve got, you know, secondary, tertiary users of the product who are passing along. And that trust, I guess the question is, is the trust riding along with that? So that the first user and the second user and the third user are all coasting through the scene, kind of feeling about the corporate reputation, or does it change over time?

Jeff Nemeth: 21:34 Yeah, well, I think certainly what we didn’t realize inside our company was the importance of our second owners, third owners, fourth owners. And by the way, most cars have 4.8 owners. So before they’re scrapped or retired in some way, turn it to planters. So what we didn’t realize is how big a group that was. So we have 46 million Ford owners in the United States. And out of that 46 million, only 10 million of them are bought new and still retain their car. So 36 million of them bought the car used and they’re brand ambassadors. And we’ve never thought of them that way. And we never thought of building trust with those used car buyers. And it’s actually more important with the second owner, third owner, fourth owner of a Ford trust that is than it is with new car owners because the used car owners don’t have a safety net.

Jeff Nemeth: 22:26 So when you buy a new car, you’ve got one, you’ve got a dealer with a big building that might be your neighbor in your community. And they’re usually pillars of the community, or we love our dealers. They’re fantastic. But when you buy a used car, you might not get it from a dealer. You also you might not have a warranty. If the car is old enough, when you buy it, it’ll be out of warranty. So you’ve got no safety nets. You might’ve bought it from some person you don’t know, a private individual or a used car, lot that you might buy it from online used car they’re becoming fashionable. And so there’s no brick and mortar there for you even to go and talk to somebody, you have to send them an email. So what we’re finding is building trust with those used car customers while it’s a little bit harder because we have less connections, those contact points with them. Today, more than ever, with all of the various conduits available for public opinion and feedback to the community, nurturing trust with those customers is becoming more and more important. And so we’re really starting to focus on those third and fourth owners, second, third, and fourth owners, and really to influence them to have a trust opinion about us. And that’s difficult. I’m not going to lie to you. It’s uncharted territory for us. And we’re just kind of starting to scratch.

Allison Hartsoe: 23:35 Yeah. I can see where that would be difficult because if I buy my Ford from my family, it might be possible to understand through an address connection that there’s second or third owner of getting passed down. And if I show up at the dealer, I might also appear in the data sets that you end up looking at. But if I buy it from, you know, Joe neighbor down the street and I take it to Joe repair guy, and I’m not in the dealer network, really the only place you can pick up my sale is probably in the public records of the title transfer or in the, if I got on social media and I start talking about it.

Jeff Nemeth: 24:14 Yeah. And we do that. We scrape social media for people that are talking about their Ford. We’ll try to connect with them. We’ll send out a note and say, Hey, are you were talking about your Ford? Can you tell us more about that? We’d love to create a relationship with you, or we’d love to be here for you if you need us. So we have a call center at 1800 number and, or I guess we can’t call them anymore. Cause the other eight, eight, eight. But anyway, so they call us up and then we get their name, we get their VIN number, and then we create a customer record. So out of those 46 million people, we have information about 30 plus million, 31, 32 million. So we have been able to create that relationship with our used car owners, either through going to a dealer, to buy a part or get a service or calling our call center or just connecting with us on social media, we try and we have something called Ford path, which is an app.

Jeff Nemeth: 25:06 And if you buy, if you have a Ford, you can enter your VIN number in. And if you’ve got a newer Ford, it’s got a modem in it, and it’ll actually connect to your car, and then you can lock and unlock your car with your phone and you can start it with your phone. And if you buy a used Ford through our dealerships, you can actually get reward points. And so you can go in and get a free oil change with the reward points that you get on the app. And then when you get service and things from dealers, you get more rewards, you earn points and you can spend them in different ways. It’s been with the dealer. You can even use them, you know, at various restaurants and other things as well.

Allison Hartsoe: 25:37 I think that’s a clever way to build the lifelong connection with your consumers even as they start to move across that 4.8 uses of the car before it becomes scrap. And I imagine that the app approach is not just a great way to collect data, but it’s a great way to understand people’s usage and their intent and how often they’re coming back. And does it look like they should be coming back? It basically gives you an opening to engage them in the post-purchase world. You know, the second, third, fourth ownership is that how it’s thought about internally is as more of a two-way communication pattern.

Jeff Nemeth: 26:14 Yeah. We asked them if they’d be willing to opt into us getting data from their vehicle. And then that gives us a rich data source so that we understand how they drive the car. How fast, how slow, how hard they hit the brakes,

Allison Hartsoe: 26:28 And, sorry that’s coming from the app, not from the car itself.

Jeff Nemeth: 26:31 Well, it’s downloading from the car into the app and then we get it through the app. So as your phone connects to the car, the car then tells us, and we ask them if they’re willing to do that. And we tell them the normal privacy stuff. We’re not going to sell your information. This is just for internal use, which is all true. And Oh, it’s trying to make a better experience for them. And the more we can understand them about the way they drive and how they use their car, then the more we can develop a vehicle that is going to be the right vehicle for them. One of the things we offer, for example, is usage-based insurance. And we’re not the only ones that do this, but we, through our Ford pass and through the modem in the car, if you bopped into this, you actually get vehicle telemetry and it sends it to our insurance company.

Jeff Nemeth: 27:11 And so if you’re a safe driver, if you stop for red lights and you drive the speed limit, it’s kind of the safe drivers get 40% off or other TV commercials. We have that same opportunity for our customers as well with our usage-based insurance. You can do that as a used owner or a new owner through the FordPass app. So it’s just another way to provide a service, make a connection. And as time goes on, we’re going to have more services that we can offer mobility services, especially as we get autonomous vehicles, electric vehicles looking for some place to charge it. You can find that on the Ford app, parking, finding someplace to park, finding someplace to get your car service. If you have a breakdown, which is close to a tow truck, all those things you can get through our app. And we’re hoping to continue to expand those services so that we can do more for our customers. And then we can also have a revenue stream on the back end as well. So that’s part of rolling that out.

Allison Hartsoe: 28:04 Here’s a tricky question then is Ford becoming a tech company as opposed to a car company?

Jeff Nemeth: 28:10 I love hearing this. I mean, really aren’t we all, I mean, we are cars now. I love telling people this when Cray came out with their first supercomputer, and it was the department of defense was using it to aim nuclear missiles. Our cars today have more computing power in them than that Cray computer did when it first came out. So are we a car company or are we a tech company? You know, the lines are blurred these days, and we probably have more engineers doing code lines of code to control our engines and our transmissions. And we have an active suspension. We’ve got everything inside the car, all the telematics, and all the telemetry where we’ve got the sensors inside the car. That sense how quickly you’re going around a corner and apply brakes or change the torque to the different tires to put you more in control. That’s called dynamic stability control. As you’re going around the corner, we’ve even got some cars that feel when your tires are going into a charcoal and actually pushes it down so that it reaches the bottom faster. And then it senses when it gets to the other wall of the hole and yanks the tire out of the hole so that you don’t get that impact on your suspension system. And so are we a tech company or are we a car company? You know, I’d say yes,

Allison Hartsoe: 29:26 Yes. And that is kind of a gateway to longterm customer relationships. I think isn’t it? I mean, it’s not like if you have technology or if you have data, you’re instantly customer-centric, and you’re instantly knowing what to do about it. I don’t think that’s the case. I think it’s more of what you do with it. So let’s say that I am a fairly new brand, and I want to have lifelong customers. What would you recommend with your experience that brands today think about or do as they try to become longterm solid brands over time by Ford?

Jeff Nemeth: 30:01 Well, I can give you like a tactical checklist. I think, first of all, recognize that price is not all that matters and focus on establishing a relationship with your customers, understand that customer archetype understand what value means to them. And there’s going to be some people that are just going to buy the lowest price thing. Some people are going to be that way. But what we’ve found is in our vehicles, if you look at the top 10 purchase reasons, prices are in there when you ask them why you bought this car, price is not in the top 10. And so understand that don’t get too hung up on price, get hung up on listening to your customers, and giving them what they value. Number two would be let your customer-facing employees or partners of your wholesale like we are, we have dealers that are the retailers, let them know what your expectations are and partner with them to build that relationship with the customer. So every one of our dealers is a separate business, and they have their own ways of doing business and their own motivating factors. But some of these things have to be non-negotiable and come to an agreement with your dealers, encourage them to listen to their customers, and then put in writing what those expectations are so that there’s no mistake and it’s black and white. And then you can develop KPIs off of that.

Allison Hartsoe: 31:16 Does that also work if I’m working through distributors, you know, say I’m, if I’m Nike and I’m pushing through Dick’s sports, maybe I have that kind of leverage, but if I’m a smaller company going to a larger distributor, can I also set my expectations?

Jeff Nemeth: 31:32 Well, I think if you’ve talked to the distributor, I mean, it’s just common sense. This is the way I’m advertising. This is the way I’m developing my products. This is the messaging I’m sending out into the community. If you don’t lean into this, you’re going to sell fewer shoes. So I want you to lean into these values and demonstrate them. And here’s what they are. Let’s write them down and let’s figure out how we translate them into your business and into the way you communicate with your employees and your customers so that there’s a little third line. And if there’s alignment there, it’s going to be more efficient, right? And then I guess the last thing or leave you with is listen to your customers. And I mean, intimately, I’m famous for saying intimate within my team. And they always, when I say we need to be intimate with our customers, and they said, I bet you’re not going to say that to Jim. And I said, that’s the bet, I’ll work with it. So anyway, what I was explaining it, like, what I said to him was your customers need to believe that you care about them and you will put their interests in front of yours. And the only way you’re gonna get them to believe that is to have an intimate knowledge of what’s important to them and that what you would have to do to make them believe that their best interest is more important than your best interest.

Allison Hartsoe: 32:51 I think that’s a really great, an often underscored item when you add the word intimate because most people are like, Oh, we listened to our customers. It’s over in the call center over in this corner somewhere. And we get a report once a month. That’s not listening to the customers.

Jeff Nemeth: 33:09 Yeah. And it’s the other thing I like to say is customer-centricity. A lot of people they say, Oh yeah, we listened to our customers, our customers in the middle of everything we do. And to me, that’s not customer-centricity. Customer centricity, to me, means when a customer is thinking about what their next car is going to be. The only consideration that they have is Ford so that we are in the center of their focus. And to me, that’s what customer-centricity means is there’s only one choice. If you’re a customer. And the only way you’re going to get there is by letting them tell you how they feel about you and genuinely hold yourself accountable. For those feelings, don’t rationalize it away. Don’t say, Oh, that was the dealer. Oh, it was raining that day or that an intimate relationship with your customers when you listen to them, and you genuinely act on what they tell you and hold yourself accountable to do so. And if you do that, you’re going to build lifetime customer.

Allison Hartsoe: 34:04 I love it. Jeff, that is such an elegant way to wrap up our show. It’s a wonderful checklist. Very good advice. Thank you for sharing that with us, and thank you for joining us today.

Jeff Nemeth: 34:15 You bet I enjoyed it too, Allison, thanks for having me

Allison Hartsoe: 34:19 As always, links to everything we discussed about this show and past shows, particularly things that Jeff might have referenced that are relevant from past shows will be at ambitiondata.com/podcast. Remember, when you use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. This is not magic. It’s a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. See you next time on the customer equity accelerator.